Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Murdered for Who He Was

In the United States, for all its consecration of equal rights, the members of minority groups have often had to pay a terrible price just for being who they are. It is a history that African-Americans, Asians, Jews, Italians, Irish and others know too well, and its most compelling image, the symbol of a dangerous knot in the American spirit, has always been the black figure at the end of a lynch rope, hanging from a tree. But other groups have been the victims of that murderous impulse too, and homosexuals have always been among them. Gradually, crimes motivated by hate have come to be seen as a category of their own.

Forty states have passed hate-crime laws, but 19 of those do not cover sexual orientation. Ten states have no laws at all. There is no adequate Federal standard of what constitutes a hate crime, and nothing could make plainer the need for one than the way young Matthew Shepard died in Wyoming yesterday. Slight, trusting and uncertain how well he would be accepted as an openly gay freshman at the University of Wyoming, Mr. Shepard returned from school in Europe to begin college in his home state this fall. His murder there is a gruesome reminder of how much hostility remains, three decades after the beginning of the modern gay rights movement.

Wyoming was the first state to grant women the right to vote, but Laramie, the home seat of the university, is a small town in a masculine culture. The campus has a gay, lesbian and transgender group where Matt Shepard found companionship, but the town is not big enough to have its own gay bar. Instead, more in keeping with a culture in which homosexuals are more and more integrated with everyone else, there was one bar in which gays and straights, cowboys and college kids, laborers and children of affluence all mixed. There, a week ago, by all reports, after attending a meeting of the campus gay group, Matt Shepard was befriended by two young men, one of whom he may have made a pass at earlier that evening, then driven away to a lonely spot, tied to a fence, bashed in the head with something heavy and left to chill in almost freezing weather for 18 hours until he was found.

He died in a coma yesterday, in a state without a hate-crimes law. Its legislature had rejected the latest attempt to pass one in February. Matt Shepard spoke three languages or more. He seemed bright and open and full of promise. We will never know what he would have done in life. But in death, in a nation sickened by the gratuitous thuggery of his murder, he may do much to dispel the stubborn belief in some quarters that homosexuals are not discriminated against. They are. Hatred can kill. The men accused of killing Matthew Shepard will be tried for first-degree murder. But his death makes clear the need for hate-crime laws to protect those who survive and punish those who attack others, whether fatally or not, just because of who they are.